iPhones could replace BlackBerrys as corporate favourite

The big banks are taking a long hard look at Apple's iPhone as their new business phone, which could cause severe problems for BlackBerry

Royal Bank of Scotland (RBS) has confirmed it is the latest big bank to trial iPhones and iPads with its senior staff, joining US giants Citigroup and Bank of America in testing Apple’s devices.

It's yet more bad news for Research in Motion (RIM), creator of the BlackBerry line of phones which has, until now, been the darling of the corporate and banking world.

The news follows a catastrophic embarrassment for the company after a server crash on October 10 left millions of BlackBerry users without email, text or internet for the best part of a week.

‘We are piloting iPhones and iPads within our leadership team,’ RBS told the Guardian, adding that for now the trial Apple devices would be configured as ‘read only’, meaning company data wouldn’t be stored on the handsets.

The trials will show how suitable Apple’s devices are for banking and business, as industry standards require communication between staff to be logged and retrievable.

The iPhone and iPad will also need to display a certain level of security when dealing with sensitive banking information. BlackBerrys have been the corporate favourite because of their automatic encryption features and the storage of sent communications and data on RIM’s central servers.

Extensive control options are another attractive prospect, as company phones can be blocked from sending business data to certain destinations, such as private email accounts.

While the BlackBerry server outages have undeniably shaken confidence in the company, it seems unlikely that the ball wasn’t already rolling in most cases for these trials to go ahead.

Apple has added many more security features in the last few versions of iOS, including automatic encryption and a remote memory wipe function in the event a handset gets lost. There are also more control options available for companies to configure security on the iPhones they issue to staff.

It’s therefore understandable that Apple handsets have become increasingly attractive to the banking sector, but with RIM’s server issues there’s even more incentive than ever.

The future could be quite bleak for the Canada-based BlackBerry manufacturer if more banks take on iPhones as their weapons of choice.

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